Proud Boys making plans to mobilise as Trump repeats election fraud lies
5 November 2024, 02:11
Members of the far-right extremist group that played a critical part in the January 6 Capitol attack are mobilising ahead of Tuesday’s election.
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Local chapters of the Proud Boys extremist group have been making plans to mobilise on election day and afterwards.
According to reports from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, the group is reassembling following the January 6 attack on the United States Capitol and is planning a potentially violent comeback.
The Times analysed one 1 million messages from 50 different channels on Telegram that are encouraging members to dispute election results, largely echoing Donald Trump’s false claims about election fraud.
One message, from an Ohio-based Proud Boys channel, read: “The day is fast approaching when fence sitting will no longer be possible,
“You will either stand with the resistance or take a knee and willingly accept the yoke of tyranny and oppression.”
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According to the WSJ, the North Phoenix Proud Boys chapter posted a photo to Trump’s own social media platform, Trump Social, of a stockpile of weapons with the caption “Proud Boys stocking up getting ready for Nov…It’s going to be biggley!!”
The Proud Boys played a significant part in the January 6 Capitol Attack, with more ‘boots on the ground’ than any other during the attack in 2021.
Several Proud boys leaders have since been convicted of seditious conspiracy and are still in prison, including former chairman Enrique Tarrio, who is serving 22 years in prison.
But the extremist white supremacist group remains active around the States, and claim they have been enrolling members as poll workers and poll watchers according to messages reviewed by NBC News.
The Proud Boys of Columbus, Ohio, posted a message on Monday that said: “The task is simply too important to trust to regular normies, so it was an all-hands-on-deck effort.”
“Locked, loaded, and ready for treasonous voter fraud,” another account wrote Sunday before it added an anti-gay slur. “Stand back and stand by f-----s.”
‘Stand back and stand by’ is the infamous phrase Trump said to the group during the first presidential debate of the 2020 election, weeks before the Capitol attack.
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The group has not disclosed explicit plans to interfere with Tuesday’s election, or made any public calls to action to its members. But the group’s activity on Telegram suggests they might respond violently to a potential Trump defeat.
“While other platforms are primarily about self-expression, ‘owning the libs’ and hateful buffoonery, Telegram often generates an ambience of ‘let’s get something done,’” Paul M. Barrett, the deputy director of the Stern Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University, told the Times.
Trump has ramped up his violent rhetoric in the last few days of his election campaign, frequently repeating anti-immigrant talking points, along with repeating false claims about election fraud.
On Sunday (3 November), Trump said he “wouldn’t mind” if an assassin shot through the press to get to him, labelling them “fake news”. His campaign put out a statement in response claiming that Trump was talking about his concerns for the safety of journalists at the rally.
More than two dozen states have indicated they are ready to send National Guard troops to Washington D.C. in the coming weeks as they prepare for the possibility of violence in the capital.
